American Master of French Cooking Julia Child’s Home in France Is for Sale

Except for her original stove, most of the kitchen and home has been kept in exactly Julia Child’s style

The Julia Child Foundation

La Pitchoune, the Provence home where Julia Child went to escape her American fame, is now for sale.

For the first time in its history, the French home of “America’s first kitchen celebrity” Julia Child is for sale to the public, and it still includes Julia’s carefully arranged and well-stocked kitchen, complete with a pegboard with outlines for each tool, as designed by her husband, Paul Child.

The home, located in Provence was named La Pitchoune, or “The Little Thing,” and Julia, who used the home as her own culinary lab, nicknamed it “La Peetch.”

Built from her unending love for the country and a desire to escape the obligations that came with the success of her cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her television program The French Chef, the Childs chose to build a “simple, modest and as-maintenance-free-as-possible house” on a potato patch near the farmhouse owned by Julia’s longtime friend and collaborator, Simca Beck, and her husband.

Not long after the home was completed in 1966, the Childs began hosting their other culinary friends at La Pitchoune, like the cookbook author and teacher James Beard who shaped so much of American cuisine, and the beloved food writer M.F.K. Fisher.

Today, all that incredible food history comes with an asking price of 800,000 euros, or approximately $880,000. “You could almost say we’re selling the kitchen with the property thrown in,” Alexander Kraft, chairman of Sotheby’s International Realty France, told the New York Times. “It’s really got the same look and feel as the one in the Smithsonian. Whoever buys it is really buying a true piece of Julia Child’s history.”